|
García
Robles, Alfonso
(b. March 20, 1911, Zamora, Michoacán, Mex.--d. Sept. 2, 1991, Mexico
City), Mexican diplomat and advocate of nuclear disarmament,
corecipient with Alva Reimer Myrdal of Sweden of the Nobel Prize for Peace for
1982.
García
Robles entered Mexico's foreign service in 1939
and was a delegate to the 1945 San Francisco Conference, at which the United
Nations was founded. He subsequently worked in the UN Secretariat for
several years. As director general in the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs
during the late 1950s, García Robles played a central role at the Law of the Sea
conferences.
While serving as ambassador to Brazil,
he first encountered the proposition of excluding nuclear armaments from Latin
America, and, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he persuaded the
Mexican government to support such a policy. His unremitting efforts eventually
led to the Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967), which committed 22 nations of Latin
America to bar nuclear weapons from their territories. A year later he helped
draft the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He was appointed
permanent representative to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1977. In
1978 he served as chairman of the Mexican delegation to the UN General
Assembly's special session on disarmament.
|
|
